Signet Classics. Front cover missing, found in Tesco’s in Sowerby Bridge. Rating: swollen gladius.
Scott’s Ivanhoe is supposed to be a revolutionary work of liberalism and empathy. John Henry Raleigh alleges that it is one of the first works to challenge the pantomime depiction of the Wandering Jew in English Literature, challenging the “simplistic portrait” that was afforded to Jews. Yet, when I subject myself to this battered, historical copy – feeling like Beaumanoir, the ascetic and austere Knights Templar Grand Master of the novel – I begin to understand how farcical it is, and how idiotic a literary culture must have been to venerate it as something radiating with compassion. When I began reading it – feeling like the Crusaders, loyal to Richard I, who are an endless force throughout the novel – I find one defence for it: at least Scott has done his research. Yet I later discover that, despite getting his hands on something called the Wardour Manuscript, and faithfully reading it on our behalf, he hasn’t, really. It is a novel about the twelfth century, yet you have lots of talk about friars and St. Francis. St. Francis didn’t start preaching and loitering around Italy until well after the events of the novel have occurred, in the thirteenth century, not to mention the time lag between St. Francis’ ideas coming to Italy. I knew that, but a simple search reveals countless other historial accuracies, which aren’t exactly like the kind of trivialities you find about modern films on an IMDB page. It isn’t just people having the wrong swords, it is that the kind of tournaments that he depicts post-date the events that are supposed to be occurring in the novel by about 200 years. Then there’s the improbability of the fact that the Knights Templar were about to burn Rebecca, a Jewish cabbalistic sorcerer and fitty, at the stake, before she was saved by the unproblematically heroic Wilfred of Ivanhoe, the hero of the novel. This would never have happened in the twelfth century, in which witches were simply not burned, and would not have happened until the mid-thirteenth century.
Surely if Scott had done minimal research he ought to have known that? Yet maybe we’re just laughing at Scott’s futile attempt to depict history from our quaint digital vantage point, and we should rejoice instead in the entertainment and rich dialogue of the novel. I am not really entertained by battles, especially when I know the Normans, despite their number and arrogance, are going to lose, just this once. (A huge theme of the novel is the supremacy of the Saxons as the indigenous English, although they are a little hard-headed and arrogant. Even Richard the Lionheart is traced in terms of Saxon genealogy, who was presumably very ‘Norman’.) Nor am I entertained by the dialogue. The characters all speak in this sort of hyper-racialised way, as if they are only aware of their own culture and the relevant cultural reference points, despite living in the same country and so presumably having to interact with each other a fair bit. One exception to this might be Rebecca, the Jewish lass who knows Latin and is one of the first non-anti-semitic portrayals of a Jew in English Literature, although I am sickened by the way that this point has to be made by Normans and Saxons alike finding her fit. At the end she finds Rowena (who Ivanhoe marries, despite being brought back to live by Rowena and continuing to find her fit until his dying days), and announces her departure. This is fortuitous because Ivanhoe can stop fantasising about her and get to the serious business of having a fiery Saxon wife (although it’s probably too unfair to Scott to expect him to put something as radical as intermarriage in a novel for the early-nineteenth century reading public.) Yet even Rebecca is effectively a synecdoche for the Jewish people, deprived callously of her own individual consciousness. Her speech includes the phrase, “Not in a land of war and blood, surrounded by internal factions, can Israel hope to find rest during her wanderings.”
This is just to mention the most thoroughly amazing character in the novel. There is a totally ridiculous incident – which Scott acknowledges is ridiculous and defends by saying that he was simply asked to put it in – in which the pure-blood Saxon Athelstane is resurrected at the end of the novel. He was clearly killed earlier in the novel in a battle when Our Lovely Saxon Heroes attack Torquilstone, the Norman fortification in which the Saxons have been wantonly held captive by these pantomime Frenchies. Yet he appears – alive! – in this ludicruous and fatuous deus ex machina moment in which Richard I returns to England and Richard, Ivanhoe and Cedric (Cedric became an English name because Scott misspelled the older ‘Cerdic’) all meet in the Castle of Coningsburgh, a Saxon fortification. What follows is the usual ahistorical Saxon babble: “It is certain that Zernebok hath possessed himself of my castle in my absence.” Zernebock is an evil Slavic deity, which no Christianised twelfth-century Saxon nobleman is really going to invoke. But that’s the point: Scott carefully twists and manipulates the dialogue of every character as if their whole animus is bound up in their connection to their racial identity, even in a way that is totally anachronistic. He seems to have no gift, whatsoever, for emotion, psychology or anything else that we might selfishly expect from characters.
All of this is a shame because I wanted to like Scott, and I’m earnestly sad that nobody bothers to read him any more. Yet his crimes extend beyond this: Scott even makes Robin Hood into a Saxon nobleman, despite the fact that part of Robin Hood’s charm is that he is a yeoman (the class above a peasant; basically, an ordinary bloke.) So how can we work up a defence of Scott? Perhaps the only way is to say that historical authenticity is impossible, and so undesirable, and Scott has at least had a good go. Yet I cannot help but think of Scott as the perpetrator of the modern period drama. There is a great quote from Joyce (who was apparently influenced by Ivanhoe, John Henry Raleigh arguing that Blazes Boylan is based on the lusty Knights Templar, Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert) in which he says something like, “The past for some is just what hat you happen to wear”. I don’t remember the quote. I think we can thank Scott for the idea that historical dramas should be quaint little dramas in which people talk in a nice, old-world way and wear certain clothes. Of course people in the past don’t stutter, defecate, have thoughts and individuality, or even exist beyond their race. Yet, please, read Scott; you might learn something that you can at least take the pleasure in unlearning.
Squidditas 